A sometimes-overwritten but realistic and often touching story of intricate family relationships.
In Kent’s coming-of-age novel, an intelligent young woman struggles with her fraught relationship with her mother.
In the early 1940s, a 20-year-old woman named Leahis determined to go to college—in part, as an escape from her family’s cramped apartment in Brooklyn: “Sharing a home with her father, sister, and brother-in-law was bad enough, but the onslaught of [her sister’s]children had made it unbearable.” Leah is ecstatic when she’s able to move into a small room in a boarding house; at Brooklyn College, she falls under the spell of a handsome professor named Noah Oliver. He woos Leah with fancy dinners, and in time, the two get married; she gives birth to a daughter named Ninon, who becomes the focus of the narrative. The mother-daughter relationship is fraught from the beginning; Leah isn’t exactly thrilled by the challenges of motherhood, nor does she take kindly to interference from her mother-in-law, Linda, who loves to lavish attention on the little girl. What’s more, Ninon is a precocious child who’s able to read at a very young age. She finds traditional schooling to be a stifling waste of time, but as much as she’d like to participate in activities with adults, Leah reminds her repeatedly that Ninon’s her daughter, and not her friend. Leah’s parenting style is cold, to say the least, as she even unjustly blames Ninon for the death of a family member. At one point, Ninon says, not without reason, “My mother hates me. She has since the day I was born.” With time, can the two reconcile and reach an understanding?
Ninon’s childhood journey is extensively detailed, with references to Girl Scout cookie sales, summer camp, and a trip to Yankee Stadium, where a young Ninon gets to meet “the nineteen-year-old Yankee rookie sensation Mickey Mantle.” The latter might have been a rewarding surprise, but this event, like many others, involves an extensive buildup, with Ninon’s grandfather explaining, “I will get tickets for us at Yankee Stadium for the World Series, and I will even get to have you meet Mickey Mantle.” (The Mick, for his part, doesn’t have a lot to say, other than “We Okies la-ak to greet people with big be-ar hugs.”) Many other figures in the story state what they are going to do before doing it, as when one of Ninon’s later suitors announces that he’ll “meet [her] after work and walk [her] home,” before meeting her after work and walking her home. Despite all this unnecessary scene-setting, the more time that the reader spends with Ninon, the more likable she becomes—and the more grating her mother’s criticisms become. After one frightening mishap, her mother tells her that “your fatness buffered your landing, so you didn’t get killed.” As a result, it’s easy to feel for Ninon when she loses people who treat her more kindly, and it invests readers in the ongoing question of what Ninon will be like as she grows older, and how she’ll process the traumatic events of her past.
A sometimes-overwritten but realistic and often touching story of intricate family relationships.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798893083972
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Newman Springs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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